PhD. The World that Changed the Machine

Hearing from the Characters Who Brought You that Change
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 979-8-3509-6878-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 444 Seiten

Reihe: The World that Changed the Machine

William Sharfman published countless interviews with top automotive executives and designers in 'Automobile' - a publication that celebrated the innovation, genius, and joy that cars gave collectors and drivers the world over. The interviews, written between 1985 and 2001, focused on cars and the personalities, passion, and idiosyncrasies of the people who made them. Forty-one of the interviews from that period are collected in this anthology.

Dr. William L. Sharfman, PhD. was a consulting strategist, author, writer, interviewer, advisor, coach, and lover of life. Dr. Sharfman's career spanned more than 50 years and was characterized by a passion and diversity of interests that served his writing, consulting, and coaching. As a consulting strategist, Dr. Sharfman provided clients with pathways to competitive advantages across the corporate spectrum, as well as personal coaching. Before opening his own consulting firm, Dr. Sharfman served in leadership positions with J. Walter Thompson's Corporate Communications Division and J. Walter Thompson USA. He was a lecturer and professor at Columbia College; Columbia University; and Idaho State University, where he was vice chairman of the English Department. He also served as Director of Judging for the Automotive News PACE Awards for Innovation and a Contributing Writer for Automobile Magazine. Dr. Sharfman shared his breadth of expertise in science, literary criticism, art history, and the automotive industry in publications like 'The New York Sun', 'International Management', 'Praxis Post', and more. When he wasn't working, he spent his time as a motorcycle racer, jazz musician, and global adventure traveler. Dr. Sharfman passed away on August 1, 2020 at the age of 77.

Autoren/Hrsg.

PhD.,

Leseproben

This Is About More Than Cars

Car Talk!

If you’ve heard one Tappet Brother, you’ve heard them both.

Dateline: Boston, December 1997 (cover date May 1998)

Tom and Ray Magliozzi appear weekly on 440 National Public Radio stations as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers; the program is “Car Talk.” It’s a program that men and women equally, and even people who don’t care much about cars, seem to like listening to each week -- in other words, a phenomenon of sorts -- human and electro-mechanical comedy, maybe. During most installments of this one-hour weekly phone-in and talk show, the laughter is contagious and the automotive (and interpersonal) diagnostics are, so to speak, engaging. Their weekly audience now exceeds two and a half million.

Tom and Ray also have a twice-weekly nationally syndicated newspaper column, as well as a website at everywhere.

Bill Sharfman spent a morning with Tom and Ray in their studio, at WBUR, Boston, which is, in fact, at the corner of Commonwealth and Buick. Everything that appears here is, in their words and the words of their attorneys, Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe, “in their opinion.” That’s our opinion, too.

Bill: How did you get started?

Ray: Owning a garage in Cambridge and teaching adult education. One of the people who took our course worked here at WBUR, invited us on a panel with a bunch of mechanics to field questions from a listening audience. I sent my brother, but no one else showed up.

Tom: They were all working.

Ray: All rebuilding transmissions. They invited both of us back. It’s a college station, probably got a listening range of a thousand yards. I got suspicious, we were getting calls from forty miles away. I wondered why they were hearing the show and then driving forty miles away to call. Then the panic set in. We’ve been panic stricken ever since.

Bill: I can see that. What is the show all about, really?

Ray: It started entirely about cars, people would call and say, “I’m taking the cylinder head off my Datsun,” We’d say, “Don’t forget the specs when you adjust the valves.” We didn’t want to talk about that.

Tom: People were calling us from their driveways....

Ray: …Torque wrench in one hand, phone on their shoulder, salami sandwich in their teeth.

Tom: Why were they doing it?

Ray: Exactly, I’ve got the transmission apart from my Dodge pick-up. We’d ask, “why are you doing this? Are you nuts?”

Tom: We grew up driving real shitboxes, so you’re always fixing something out in the street. You can’t forget the feelings you had. That’s what did it, always driving heaps and having intense feelings toward the car, the tools. Then we decided we were more interested in the people.

Ray: The person who drives a new leased car every three years doesn’t have the connection with his car. Our background, like most of our listeners, is you’re elated if your car starts every day and shocked if it makes it to your destination. When we do a repair, if it starts the next morning, we’ve done something wonderful. LAUGHTER

Bill: What do you suppose is your success ratio with the calls you get?

Ray: If we can extrapolate from our “Stump the Chumps” section of our show, it’s about fifty percent. Wouldn’t you say?

Tom: More. Two out of three, maybe three out of four. We should be learning something every time we do the show. It was only a year and a half ago we still started the show, “Are we on?”

Ray: The brass from NPR kept calling, “They don’t have to hit the microphones! You could just tell them they’re on.”

Tom: It’s probably a much higher rate than the mechanic who fixes the car, he’s probably only right forty percent of the time.

Bill: You also dispense quite a lot of psychology one way and another.

Tom: Yeah. Well, we don’t know anything about that either. LAUGHTER

Ray: We wanted to impress on callers who were destroying their cars that it’s only a car. If you’ve got a thousand dollar car, you decide to take the head off and rebuild it and you screw it up, it’s not the end of the world. Once we put that in perspective for our listeners, we began to have a lot more fun and they did too.

Tom: People take it very seriously. It isn’t worth it.

Ray: That’s why we don’t get many calls from Porsche owners, because they take their cars too seriously.

Tom: Or BMW owners.

Ray: We get the junk box owners. That’s what we want, the ordinary person. If the car represents your life savings, you bought the wrong car.

Tom: You bought the right car but you’re screwed up. LAUGHTER

Bill: What opportunities do you have to exert pressure for the good?

Tom: Us? LAUGHTER How many lawsuits can we handle at one time? Everything that sounds negative is followed by “in my opinion.” That’s what our lawyers told us to say.

Ray: Right.

Tom: Everything. You say, “that’s complete junk ... in my opinion.” Then you’re safe.

Bill: Probably a good idea if we put that in.

Tom: We have to admit that American car manufacturers are doing a lot better than fifteen years ago. The number of sleaze balls is probably reduced, I don’t know how much.

Ray: It’s all right to say that.

Tom: Still very high. In my opinion. LAUGHTER

Bill: So what’s the state of the industry at the present time?

Tom: I’m opposed to cars. The car has overtaken the world. Global warming. Americans have to drive to the corner to buy milk, if the price of gasoline goes up a nickel, I might be able to live with that. Who tells us that? The Congress of these here United States, the biggest bunch of sleaze balls, the worst....

Bill: In your opinion?

Ray: Lawyers. It’s tragic. In terms of quality of manufacture, we all agree that the automobile industry is better. But I’m dismayed that we make a car like a Lincoln Navigator that gets twelve miles to a gallon. You want to drive that thing? You ought to pay a hundred thousand dollars, fifty thousand should be tax. It’s ridiculous. A danger to everyone else on the road, global warming’s another issue.

Bill: The truckification of America?

Tom: Very sad. LAUGHTER

Ray: Forces everyone else to buy a truck. Carphones is another epidemic.

Bill: Can’t people talk and drive at the same time?

BOTH: No! Not on the phone.

Tom: When I learned to drive I was told you’re supposed to have both hands on the wheel unless you’re shifting or....

Ray: ...Groping your girlfriend.

Tom: Shifting and groping were the only two things allowed for taking one hand off the wheel. Talking on the damned cellphone sneaked into cars without anyone in Congress -- that bunch of sleaze balls....

Ray: It isn’t so much the hands that bother me, it’s taking the eyes off the road.

Tom: But think how it makes your girlfriend feel.

Bill: Are there problems that keep coming up? Mechanical ones, electrical ones, human ones?

LAUGHTER

Ray: The relationship problem that comes up is that one spouse will say, I always downshift to slow down, and when they drive together, there’s friction, so we try to smooth that crazy stuff over.

Bill: You mean friction both between them and in the car?

Ray: Right, in the clutch and between them, exactly.

Bill: So your show is about eliminating friction?

Ray: To hell with the clutch, it’s unimportant. You burn out the clutch early because you shouldn’t be always downshifting to slow down, but if that’s what your husband wants, and we know he’s a knuckle-head and now you know it, and maybe he isn’t listening, then you can go ahead and downshift when he says and not worry.

Bill: You downshift and he buys the clutch?

Ray: There you go.

Bill: Are some cars more a pleasure to talk about or work on and some less?

Tom: Lots are just very boring. When someone calls and says, “I have a Chevy Cavalier,” if it blows up, fine.

Ray: But a Cavalier can be exciting because you never know if you’re going to get there. LAUGHTER

Tom: Unfortunately there are lots of very boring cars. Most of them made by General Motors.

Bill: Is boring the worst thing you can say about a car?

Tom: Boring is the worst thing you can say about anything. LAUGHTER

Ray: No....